Hometown Pride.

Fresno is #1!

Memory-holed? 

Count on it.

I don't doubt that this guy is a kook, but his kookiness sounds an awful lot like mainstream positions taken in various leftists protests and we have yet to see media calls for prominent leftwing politicians to repudiate these positions.

Also, if a white shooter had randomly gunned down four African-Americans in Fresno, we'd be listening to how Fresno is a hotbed of racism.

//Fresno shooting soon to be memory-holed

Kori Ali Muhammad is in custody after going on a murder spree in Fresno, California, yesterday.  Muhammad "set out to kill as many white people as he could on Tuesday, gunning down three men on the streets of downtown Fresno before he was captured and admitted to the shootings, authorities said."

Are you beginning to see the inconvenience of the story? It's gets worse. The maniac shouted "Allahu Akbar" as the police tackled him.

We have a trinity of narrative-kills: black, white-killer and Muslim.

There was some "confusion" in the reporting of the murders. The Associated Press tweeted out that the killer shouted "G-d is great" before he was taken down by the cops. But that's not what he yelled. Remember back to another inconvenient event, the Orlando shooting, and the transcripts released by the Obama administration. They also "translated" what the murderous maniac said to the 911 dispatchers.

Muhammad was also wanted in connection with the killing of a hotel security guard last week in Fresno.

The New York Post has a nice round-up of all of Muhammad's anti-white statements. Will there be calls for the progressives to tone down their anti-white rhetoric lest they incite someone like Muhammad to undertake a killing spree? It's not that I believe there should be such calls, but the public is often chastised and warned that we need to watch what we say because we might cause a specially designated group or persons to action.

The media only discredits itself when it sanitizes the news for its own political purposes. People notice and that's why the media has little credibility. It's not so much a question of what they report but how they decide to "frame" it for the viewer. We don't need the narrative, we just need the facts.//

Fresno news...

...but she's kind of far from the ocean.

Woman walking around naked in Fresno county claims she is a mermaid.

Moments that make me proud to live in Fresno.

Suspected Burglar Stuck in Chimney Dies After Homeowner Starts Fire in Fireplace

Fresno Apologetics Conference.

Here is the email that I’m sending out this week to churches and ministries in the Fresno area. Hope to see you at the conference!

I am Rev Bruce Boeckel, Associate Pastor at New Beginnings Community Baptist Church and a Christian apologist with a master’s degree in the field from Biola University.

I am contacting you to let you know about Evidence 2015, a conference in Christian apologetics that is coming to Fresno next weekend, on Friday evening and Saturday morning.

What can you expect at a conference on Christian apologetics? The purpose of Christian apologetics is to answer the questions of the seeker, respond respectfully to the objections of the skeptic, and equip the believer to be a more effective witness for Christ. The emphasis of Christian apologetics is to apply the truths of the Bible to the real world, to offer evidence and good reasons for what Christians believe (I Peter 3:15). Our conference theme for 2015 is “Confronting Moral Confusion in the 21st Century”. We have nine speakers on various aspects of our theme (some in parallel sessions) and two great segments of worship music at the conference: the Baptist Pastors’ Mass Choir on Friday evening and the Evidence 2015 Musicians on Saturday morning.

EVIDENCE 2015

February 6-7

New Covenant Community Church
1744 E Nees Ave, Fresno, CA

Fresno - Not as Islamophobic as they want you to think.

But a great location for fake "Hate Crimes."

A vandalism attack on the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno on Christmas Day was immediately branded by Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer as a “hate crime,” and the “Islamophobia” grievance industry began to gear up in response. Now that a suspect has been arrested, the narrative is quickly collapsing.

This video report by KSEE24 describes the damage done to the mosque:

But police announced today that the suspect arrested in the attack is 28-year-old Asif Mohammad Khan, who, according tonews reports, is a Muslim who used to attend the mosque and did the attack in response to bullying by some in the mosque.

In response, Dyer has quickly had to walk back his knee-jerk “hate crime” talk.

According to the Associated Press:

In the search for a suspect, Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer had said that the broken windows and bleach poured on an American flag inside the Islamic center appeared to be a hate crime. On Saturday, Dyer said that investigators interviewed Khan, and their theory has changed. “It was obviously not as we thought,” said Dyer, adding that police will let FBI agents decide whether hate-crime charges are warranted.

Khan confessed, telling officers he was upset with people at the Islamic center for talking down or bullying him, Dyer said.

Remarkably, a member of Khan’s family was allowed to speak at the police news conference to explain his supposed mental illness.

This case of premature “Islamophobia” is reminiscent of the July 2010 arson at a Marietta, Georgia, mosque that was quickly deemed by the grievance industry as a clear case of “Islamophobia” driven by “anti-Muslim” sentiment and brought demands for immediate DOJ and FBI intervention by CAIR and the other usual suspects.

Calls for widespread cultural sensitivity training, “interfaith” outreach, and candlelight vigils were all on the agenda of national Islamic organizations that held a press conference in the wake of the Marietta mosque fire:

Fire official are still not calling the blaze that started inside the mosque around 11:30 p.m. Monday night a hate crime, but mosque officials and the vice president of the Islamic Circle of North America are fearing that it is an act of “Islamophobia.”

Naeem Baig, the vice president of ICNA, was at Wednesday’s press conference and he spoke out against anti-Islamic sentiments and acts.

“Islamic Circle of North America feels very strongly that these incidents of Islamophobia are on the rise in our country,” Baig said. “It is very sad to see that just a day after we celebrated Independence Day on the Fourth of July, the very next day, on the fifth of July, somebody came and decided to destroy this property, a house of worship. This is not what America is.”

But Assistant Fire Chief Scott Tucker said his department does not want to classify the arson as a hate crime until it can talk to a suspect and confirm a motive.

“I look at this fire and I see it as very similar to other fires,” Tucker said. “I don’t think there’s anything significantly different … Until we figure out the motive, we’re going to work this fire just like it was a normal fire.”

Not much was said, however, after it turned out that the fire was set by a member of the mosque, nor were any apologies issued to the non-Muslim community that the Islamic organizations unjustly tarnished with a broad brush.

As much can be expected in this case.

Muslims get in a squabble, and everyone else has to go to a Re-education Camp.

Dietrich von Hildebrandt, Vatican II and Fresno.

An interesting critique of Vatican II by an important 20th Century theologian that has a Fresno connection.

Cool History Fun.

Observe the effects of historic nuclear weapons on your hometown.

Thanks, John Kasaian!

Fresno - America's best example of a bad example.

Steven Sailor writes:

Why does the Gang of Eight want to Fresnoify and Modestoize the rest of America?

Obviously, it's because stoop labor immigrants and their children and their grandchildren and great grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren are making us vibrant. They are our Dreamers. No white bread American from Modesto ever had any dreams about anything.

By the way, here's what life in Modesto was like a half century ago. Totally nonvibrant:

California is three different states: Nothern California, Southern California...

...and Western Appalachia.

Victor Davis Hanson explains the radical disconnect between the strip of California that lies 50 miles from the Pacific Ocean and the rest of the state.

In the interior, unemployment in many areas is over 15 percent. The theft of copper wire is reaching epidemic proportions. Thousands of the shrinking middle class have fled the interior for the coast or for nearby no-income-tax states. To fathom the nearly unbelievable statistics — as California’s population grew by 10 million from the mid-1980s to 2005, its number of Medicaid recipients increased by 7 million; one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients now reside in California — visit the state’s hinterlands.

But in the Never-Never Land of Apple, Facebook, Google, Hollywood, and the wine country, millions live in an idyllic paradise. Coastal Californians can afford to worry about trivia — and so their legislators seek to outlaw foie gras, shut down irrigation projects in order to save the three-inch-long Delta smelt, and allow children to have legally recognized multiple parents.

But in the less feel-good interior, crippling regulations curb timber, gas and oil, and farm production. For the most part, the rules are mandated by coastal utopians who have little idea where the fuel for their imported cars comes from, or how the redwood is cut for their decks, or who grows the ingredients for their Mediterranean lunches of arugula, olive oil, and pasta.

On the coast, it’s politically incorrect to talk of illegal immigration. In the interior, residents see first-hand the bankrupting effects on schools, courts, and health care when millions arrive illegally without English-language fluency or a high-school diploma — and send back billions of dollars in remittances to Mexico and other Latin American countries.

The drive from Fresno to Palo Alto takes three hours, but you might as well be rocketing from Earth to the moon.

Fresno under the Ostrogoths.

Victor Davis Hanson continues his theme of comparing to rural life in California's Central Valley to what life must have been like for residents of the former Roman empire as their found themselves surrounded by the barbarians:

Sometimes, and in some places, in California I think we have nearly descended into Miller’s dark vision — especially the juxtaposition of occasional high technology with premodern notions of law and security. The state deficit is at $16 billion. Stockton went bankrupt; Fresno is rumored to be next. Unemployment stays over 10% and in the Central Valley is more like 15%. Seven out of the last eleven new Californians went on Medicaid, which is about broke. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients are in California. In many areas, 40% of Central Valley high school students do not graduate — and do not work, if the latest crisis in finding $10 an hour agricultural workers is any indication. And so on.

And there is this:

In around 1960, rural California embraced modern civilization. By that I mean both in the trivial and fundamental sense. Rural dogs were usually vaccinated and licensed — and so monitored. Homes were subject to building codes and zoning laws; gone were the privies and lean-tos. Streets were not just paved, but well-paved. My own avenue was in far better shape in 1965 than it is now. Mosquito abatement districts regularly sprayed stagnant water ponds to ensure infectious disease remained a thing of our early-20th-century past. Now they merely warn us with West Nile Virus alerts. Ubiquitous “dumps” dotted the landscape, some of them private, ensuring, along with the general code of shame, that city-dwellers did not cast out their old mattresses or baby carriages along the side of the road. It seems the more environmental regulations, the scarcer the dumps and the more trash that litters roads and private property.

I walk each night around the farm. What is the weirdest find? A nearby alleyway has become a dumping place for the rotting corpses of fighting dogs. Each evening or so, a dead dog (pit bulls, Queensland terriers) with a rope and plenty of wounds is thrown up on the high bank. The coyotes make short work of the remains. Scattered about are several skeletons with ropes still around their necks. I suppose that at about 2 a.m. the organizers of dog fights drive in and cast out the evenings’ losers. I have never seen such a thing in 58 years (although finding plastic bags with dead kittens in the trash outside my vineyard was a close second). Where is PETA when you need them? Is not the epidemic of dog- and cock-fighting in central California a concern of theirs? (Is berating in Berkeley a corporation over meat-packing a bit more glamorous than running an education awareness program about animal fights in Parlier?)

Ironic point - the more we seek to regulate minutia, the less regulation occurs.

Perhaps because people need to be self-regulating. A complex, free society cannot work unless the people have the habits - which Victor Davis Hanson would point out is what the ancients meant by "virtue" - that make such a society possible.

So, what brought us here?

Our culprit out here was not the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated civilization. Add up the causes. One was the destruction of the California rural middle class. Manufacturing jobs, small family farms, and new businesses disappeared due to globalization, high taxes, and new regulations. A pyramidal society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at low-skilled service jobs. The guy with a viable 60 acres of almonds ceased to exist.

Illegal immigration did its share. No society can successfully absorb some 6-7 million illegal aliens, in less than two decades, the vast majority without English, legality, or education from the poorer provinces of Mexico, the arrivals subsidized by state entitlements while sending billions in remittances back to Mexico — all in a politicized climate where dissent is demonized as racism. This state of affairs is especially true when the host has given up on assimilation, integration, the melting pot, and basic requirements of lawful citizenship.

Terrible governance was also a culprit, in the sense that the state worked like a lottery: those lucky enough by hook or by crook to get a state job thereby landed a bonanza of high wages, good benefits, no accountability, and rich pensions that eventually almost broke the larger and less well-compensated general society. When I see hordes of Highway Patrolmen writing tickets in a way they did not before 2008, I assume that these are revenue-based, not safety-based, protocols — a little added fiscal insurance that pensions and benefits will not be cut.

A coarsening of popular culture — a nationwide phenomenon — was intensified, as it always is, in California. The internet, video games, and modern pop culture translated into a generation of youth that did not know the value of hard work or a weekend hike in the Sierra. They didn’t learn how to open a good history book or poem, much less acquire even basic skills such as mowing the lawn or hammering a nail. But California’s Generation X did know that they were “somebody” whom teachers and officials dared not reprimand, punish, prosecute, or otherwise pass judgment on for their anti-social behavior. Add all that up with a whiny, pampered, influential elite on the coast that was more worried about wind power, gay marriage, ending plastic bags in the grocery stores — and, well, you get the present-day Road Warrior culture of California.

The Fresno rule: Fresno gets noticed if and only if the story involves a disaster or something embarrasing.

Will Fresno be California's next Bankrupt city?

Is Fresno Next?...

...asks Victor Davis Hanson.

To file bankruptcy, that is:

There is a Citigroup report out that bond watchers are now worried about Fresno following Stockton into bankruptcy — which would be, if true, a much more serious calamity given Fresno’s far greater size and budget.

Throughout California’s Central Valley, almost everyone the last decade or more has witnessed a perfect storm of events that evoked a reaction to each day’s news along the lines of “This can’t go on.” To pick up a paper is to collate familiar categories of stories — huge public pension and salary agreements, coupled with warnings from analysts at the time that they were unsustainable; reports of exoduses of high-income earners from the center of the state (both to the coast and out of state); near-constant carnage of shootings, felony-car-accidents, and random mayhem that put each day hundreds of the uninsured into public-supported emergency rooms and hospitals; daily lawsuits against municipalities and schools on behalf of various aggrieved parties; vast increases in Medi-Cal and public-assistance rolls; and schools whose test scores are among the nation’s very lowest and whose rates of violence are not.

That things have gone on as usual until now and for so long is a testament to the enormous wealth generated by central California agriculture and gas and oil, as well as the state’s general wealth from everything from Napa Valley to Silicon Valley — even in times of slow national growth and high unemployment. But even with all that, we are reaching the end stages, as we see first with these tottering cities, where the vast revenue cannot match the even more vast expenditures.

Or in simple terms, those entities that can be taxed great amounts are shrinking and those who rely on great amounts of redistributed tax revenue are growing. And yet to suggest public-employee compensation reform, school-curriculum reform, closed borders with Mexico, tax reform, and a changed attitude about regulation and litigation would earn ostracism everywhere from a Newport Beach dock party to a Sonoma wine tasting. Unfortunately, proposed higher taxes, mandatory gay studies in the schools, the DREAM Act, sanctuary cities, court-mandated irrigation cut-offs, boundaries on new gas and oil exploration, tearing down historic bridges in Yosemite, or dreaming about blowing up the Hetch Hetchy dam are not going to address the underlying problems.

So fears of impending bankruptcies — first in the state’s center, later perhaps even on the coast — will probably grow.

If it happens, the Obama administration's plan to stifle agriculture in the Central Valley will be a big factor.

Fresno - Home of a Secret UFO Base?

Well, not so secret since it was on the Discovery Channel according to Bad UFOs:

The second episode of Chasing UFOs on the National Geographic Channel, "Dirty Secrets," was one of the most paranoid and absurd pieces of supposedly non-fiction TV that I have ever seen. Apparently the military has constructed an underground base just outside Fresno, CA (not recently, but about 60 years ago), and uses it to conduct secret research on alien technology, and perhaps the aliens themselves. And you thought that all secret UFO activity was in New Mexico or Nevada! The rich agricultural areas surrounding Fresno are probably home to more cows than people, and the generally flat terrain of the San Joaquin Valley is poorly-suited for hiding secret government stuff. But that hasn't stopped the area from becoming a local UFO Hotspot.

Fresno - We're #1!!!

Dead last in voter turnout!!!!

That automatically makes my vote more powerful in local contests!

We're going to need "Wisconsin Reform" in California.

Stockton authorizes filing for bankruptcy.

Faced with going into a new fiscal year with no money in the general fund and a potential budget deficit of $26 million, Stockton City Council has authorized the city manager to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy relief.

The vote was 6-1.

The filing would happen as soon as June 26, a day after closed-door talks with creditors are scheduled to end and only if they are unsuccessful.

Those talks are mandated by a new state law, AB 506, which was designed to have local governments and their creditors try to avoid bankruptcies through mediation.

"We've hit the wall. We're insolvent," says Mayor Ann Johnston. "We cannot wait."

City Manager Bob Deis says the city’s general fund is insolvent with no way to cut enough out of future spending to fill the budget gap.

The Central Valley city has been one of the hardest hit in the nation by the Great Recession and the foreclosure crisis resulting a sharp reduction in revenues from property and other taxes. In addition, it has one of the most generous employee retirement health packages in the country. Adding to the city’s problems has been years of dubious accounting processes.

This should be good.

Craig Bernthal is taking a sabbatical from Fresno State to write a book on J. R. R. Tolkien's sacramental vision in The Lord of the Rings.

That should be a best seller.

Woo-Hoo! Fresno is Number One...

...apparently in the category of vanity.

Naturally, the only time Fresno gets ranked number one, it's for something embarrassing.

Fresno is America's most "beauty obsessed city."

The upside - or downside, depending on which way you look at it - to social networking tools and apps is the data we are able to compile about emerging cultural trends.
Nowadays everything can be rated, recorded, reviewed and surveyed, even how vain a city's population is.

Recently InStyle.com asked the creators of the mobile app FourSquare which cities' users most frequently checked in to beauty establishments and Fresno, California came out on top.

According to the data pulled from 15million users, Fresno, about two hours North of Los Angeles, had the highest number of visits to establishments considered under the beauty category.

Sunny and beautiful: Fresno was followed by Tulsa, Oklahoma in the top ten list that featured New York and San Francisco
The Californian city has five beauty school as well as an abundance of stores like Sephora and Ulta, according to InStyle, though is not especially recognised as a beauty mecca by those in the know.

With 300,000 check-ins, it beat the even lesser known Texan metropolis of Lubbock.

Apparently -

TEN MOST BEAUTY-OBSESSED CITIES IN U.S.
1. Fresno, CA
2. Lubbock, TX
3. Tulsa, OK
4. Champaign, IL
5. Las Vegas, NV
6. Atlantic City, NJ
7. San Francisco, CA
8. New York, NY
9. Houston, TX
10. Pensacola, FL

Woo-Hoo! Fresno is Number One...

...apparently in the category of vanity.

Naturally, the only time Fresno gets ranked number one, it's for something embarrassing.

Fresno is America's most "beauty obsessed city."

The upside - or downside, depending on which way you look at it - to social networking tools and apps is the data we are able to compile about emerging cultural trends.
Nowadays everything can be rated, recorded, reviewed and surveyed, even how vain a city's population is.

Recently InStyle.com asked the creators of the mobile app FourSquare which cities' users most frequently checked in to beauty establishments and Fresno, California came out on top.

According to the data pulled from 15million users, Fresno, about two hours North of Los Angeles, had the highest number of visits to establishments considered under the beauty category.

Sunny and beautiful: Fresno was followed by Tulsa, Oklahoma in the top ten list that featured New York and San Francisco
The Californian city has five beauty school as well as an abundance of stores like Sephora and Ulta, according to InStyle, though is not especially recognised as a beauty mecca by those in the know.

With 300,000 check-ins, it beat the even lesser known Texan metropolis of Lubbock.

Apparently -

TEN MOST BEAUTY-OBSESSED CITIES IN U.S.
1. Fresno, CA
2. Lubbock, TX
3. Tulsa, OK
4. Champaign, IL
5. Las Vegas, NV
6. Atlantic City, NJ
7. San Francisco, CA
8. New York, NY
9. Houston, TX
10. Pensacola, FL

Obama: I’ll veto bill that will provide water to California’s Central Valley.

Hot Air reports:

I’ve called the judicially-imposed drought in California’s Central Valley “the Dust Bowl Congress created” through its creation of the Endangered Species Act, invoked in this case by the Delta smelt, a fish that’s not suitable for eating. Once a breadbasket for the nation, the cutoff of irrigation water to the Central Valley has destroyed agriculture and tens of thousands of jobs as a tradeoff for the endangered fish. Now, however, voices of sanity in Congress have begun to speak on the man-made economic and agricultural disaster, as Rep. Devin Nunes builds support for his Sacramento-San Joaquin Water Reliability Act:

Nunes’ Sacramento-San Joaquin Water Reliability Act goes to a vote in the House Wednesday and if it passes, it will guarantee that water the farmers paid for finally gets to the parched Central Valley. It will put an end to the sorry stream of shriveled vineyards, blackened almond groves and unemployed farm workers standing in alms lines for bagged carrots from China.

The insanity of the current policies against some of America’s most productive farmers in one of the world’s richest farm belts is largely the work leftist politicians from the wealthy enclaves of the San Francisco Bay Area. This group has exerted its political muscle on the less politically powerful region that produces more than half the fruits and vegetables consumed in the U.S. — with $26 billion in annual sales.

“The bill restores the flow of water and establishes a framework for meaningful environmental improvements. It is a repudiation of the left’s assault on rural communities, which began with the decimation of the West’s timber industry and now is focused on Central Valley agriculture,” Nunes told IBD.

The stand-alone bill, H.R. 1837, marks the first time Central Valley water shortages and the federal role in creating them will be considered directly in Congress.

That in itself is a damning indictment of the federal government, whose laws have created the disaster in California. This first came to light more than two years ago, when Sean Hannity featured it on his national television show. The delay in addressing it makes the financial situation worse with each passing day for farmers in the Valley, and for workers who now have to subsist on government handouts rather than earnings from productive jobs.

If Barack Obama has his way, though, that situation will continue indefinitely. Late yesterday, the White House announced that Obama would veto Nunes’ bill because — I am not making this up — it would “unravel decades of work” on California water regulations … decades of work that brought California’s Central Valley to its current destruction:

The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 1837, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act because the bill would unravel decades of work to forge consensus, solutions, and settlements that equitably address some of California’s most complex water challenges.

H.R. 1837 would undermine five years of collaboration between local, State, and Federal stakeholders to develop the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan. It would codify 20-year old, outdated science as the basis for managing California’s water resources, resulting in inequitable treatment of one group of water users over another. And, contrary to 100 years of reclamation law that exhibits congressional deference to State water law, the bill would preempt California water law.

The bill also would reject the long-standing principle that beneficiaries should pay both the cost of developing water supplies and of mitigating any resulting development impacts, and would exacerbate current water shortages by repealing water pricing reforms that provide incentives for contractors to conserve water supplies.

Finally, H.R. 1837 would repeal the San Joaquin River Settlement Agreement, which the Congress enacted to resolve 18 years of contentious litigation. Repeal of the settlement agreement would likely result in the resumption of costly litigation, creating an uncertain future for river restoration and water delivery operations for all water users on the San Joaquin River.

The Administration strongly supports efforts to provide a more reliable water supply for California and to protect, restore, and enhance the overall quality of the Bay-Delta environment. The Administration has taken great strides toward achieving these co-equal goals through a coordinated Federal Action Plan, which has strengthened collaboration between Federal agencies and the State of California while achieving solid results. Unfortunately, H.R. 1837 would undermine these efforts and the progress that has been made. For this reason, were the Congress to pass H.R. 1837, the President’s senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.